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Virtual water flows, water footprint and water savings from the trade of crop and livestock products of Germany
Water and Environment Journal ( IF 1.7 ) Pub Date : 2020-06-29 , DOI: 10.1111/wej.12601
Karthikeyan Brindha 1
Affiliation  

The world population will reach 9.3 billion in 2050 and the world will need 70 to 100% more food to be produced to meet the demand (World Bank, 2007). So far, the area equipped for irrigation has increased from 184 million ha in 1970 to 324 million ha in 2012 (FAO, 2016). Global water withdrawals have also increased from <600 billion m/y (Bm/y) in 1900 to about 4000 Bm/y in 2010, of which 69% was for agricultural use (FAO, 2016). Freshwater accounts for 96% of the total global water withdrawals. As the finite freshwater resources are unevenly distributed around the world, several countries with scarce resources are not able to meet their domestic food demand locally and import from other countries (Oki and Kanae, 2004; Godfray et al., 2010; D’Odorico et al., 2014). Owing to the vast use of freshwater for agriculture and the trade of these agricultural products to other countries, the exporting countries are trading the water virtually embedded in the traded products. This water that is embodied in the production and trade of agricultural products is referred to as ‘virtual water’ (VW) (Allan, 1998). Water footprint (WF) introduced by Hoekstra (2003) is a closely linked concept to VW, an indicator of water use for all goods and services consumed by one individual or by the individuals of a country. It is a multidimensional indictor that specifies the volume of water consumed, water source, pollutant types, etc. and is composed of three components: green, blue and grey WF. Since the introduction of the concept of VW and WF, research into this is booming in several parts of the world (Chen and Chen, 2013; Dalin and Conway, 2016; da Silva et al., 2016; Chouchane et al., 2018; SreeVidhya and Elango, 2019). Quantification of the VW flow (VWF) from one country to another is carried out at different spatial scales, for different products and using different approaches (top-down or bottom-up framework (Vanham and Bidoglio, 2013)). Eventually, some countries are given more importance and studied extensively (e.g. China, The United States of America (USA)) (Dang et al., 2015; Shao et al., 2017; Chini et al., 2017; Wu et al., 2019). Even though Germany is a key net VW importer through trade of agricultural products, VW studies on Germany are rarely reported.Nearly half of Germany’s land area (47.7%) is used for agriculture. About 33 Bm of freshwater is withdrawn per year, of which 14% is used for domestic and 83% for industrial uses (FAO, 2019). Agriculture uses only a small portion of the freshwater when compared with the abstraction for domestic and industrial purposes. Groundwater along with spring water and bank-filtered water form 70% of the source of drinking water (BMU, 2019). Germany ranks 9th in the world in the import of VW (1995–1999) (Hoekstra and Hung, 2002). The country tops the list of VW import (VWI) in the intra-EU trade and third in the VW export (VWE) (1993–2011) (Antonelli et al., 2017). Jiang and Marggraf (2015) studied the bilateral trade between Germany and China (2008–2011). Virtual water flows, water footprint and water savings from the trade of crop and livestock products of Germany
更新日期:2020-06-29
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